


tell the universe we're not concerned

by proximanova (helveticaneue)



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Friends to Lovers, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-20
Updated: 2017-05-20
Packaged: 2018-10-29 00:15:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10842453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/helveticaneue/pseuds/proximanova
Summary: He didn’t feel unsafe in the locker room before, but constantly wrong-footed, a little disconcerted and just off. It feels right now, like team and family and stuff like Zach had felt back at UMich and in the NTDP.When he’s on the ice there’s not any magic to get in the way. But the roar of the crowd at a home game? The sound of the cannon when they score?That feels magical.





	tell the universe we're not concerned

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thatcrudeandknavishsprite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatcrudeandknavishsprite/gifts).



> To my dear recipient, 
> 
> I saw in your likes that you enjoy magical realism, so I decided to spice up your original request a little bit. I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Title is from New Years With Carl Weathers by The Wonder Years.
> 
> I want to thank my lovely beta and best friend for cheering me on. I couldn't have done this without you! :)

The thing is, the Columbus Blue Jackets should not be bad. Zach realizes the day he gets to Nationwide Arena for the first time and sees raw magic spread thin across the locker room like an oil slick. Across the stalls and all their gear and Zach can feel it spreading over him, slippery and thin, barely there.

Zach’s a Blue Jacket now, the oil clinging to his skin proves it. He licks his hand, when no one is watching, and it tastes like a loss feels.

Zach’s played hockey his whole life, and he knows how to lose, but he wants to win. He wants to feel how he felt on the ice with the Monsters winning the Calder Cup all of the time. 

The raw magic in the locker room is just a near invisible film covering everything. It’s hard to look at his teammates sometimes, the way the light reflects off their skin. The way they look like he’s watching a 3D movie without glasses, three and six and seven and eight copies circling in air, hazy in the lights. Zach grew up around magic but he never learned to like it. It’s always been in his blood. The way it’s clinging to his teammates skin and gear and spreading across the locker room floor is familiar. The magic won’t hurt Zach. He’ll play the same as he would without it there. But his teammates won’t. 

Raw magic isn’t good or bad, like tempered magic can be, depending on who’s using it. It’s not malicious. It’s just there. The fact that sometimes it supremely fucks things up is a side effect. 

Dubi grabs Cam and gives him a facewash, startling Zach out of his thoughts. They’re both laughing. A residue of energy clings, making Cam look like four or five Cam’s at once, scattering strangely dark rainbows. He winces, barely, something Zach only sees because he’s looking.

They temper magic because the raw stuff can be dangerous. Not fatal, but it can weigh on a person. On a team. 

Zach’s got several years of magic summer school under his belt. He’s going to figure this out. 

\--- 

Josh is a good roommate, a fellow rookie who gets it too.  The magic isn’t surrounding him, doesn’t stick to him the same way it does to the guys who have been on the team longer. It slides right off and pools near his feet. He doesn’t cast a shadow in it.

(Nutivaara is a rookie too but he’s Finnish. The Finns are too close to the northern lights, where raw magic is so strong it becomes visible to people who don’t have magic in them. Zach keeps his distance.) 

“We don’t have any food except cereal,” Josh says one afternoon. “Do you want to go out to dinner?”

“I, um, I’m busy,” Zach tells him. “I have a thing.”

“You’re going somewhere?” Josh asks.

“Uh, no. I have – in my room? Alone,” Zach stutters. “Shit, that sounds like I’m going to jerk off. No, I have a thing to do that isn’t jerking off.”

Josh laughs, thankfully. “Okay. I’ll just order pizza or something. I’ll text you when it’s here so you can eat once you’re done not jerking off.”

“Thanks,” Zach says. It should be awkward – Zach’s being awkward – but something about Josh, the way he’s smiling, makes it not awkward at all. Zach smiles back at him. (Zach can smile, he promises, it just doesn’t look that different from his regular face.)

Then Zach has to go and ruin it. “Anyway, I have to go and – you know, I need to–”

“Yeah, yeah,” Josh waves him off. “Have fun.”

Zach’s been locking himself in his room a lot, since the start of the season. It’s heavy with magic, now. Zach’s family are all witches but he isn’t really – he’s a filter, unable to use magic but capable of tempering the raw stuff, taking it from its natural state and creating the ideal conditions to make it usable for witches who can. He’s pretty uniquely suited for the task of getting raw magic out of Nationwide and putting it somewhere it can’t bother anyone. 

It almost feels like it was waiting for him. 

At the summer school his parents always sent him to – the one he hated because it meant he couldn’t spend his summers playing street hockey with friends – they only worked with small amounts of magic, captured raw for Zach and the few other filters to practice on, isolated from the kids who could actually use it. 

Nationwide probably holds more magic than Zach has seen collectively in his life.

Of course, it’s not the entire building – not the ice or the stands or the concourse, and thankfully not the cannon. (Zach shudders to think what might happen if raw magic found its way to the cannon.)

It’s just the home locker room, like it's locked in there almost. It follows them out but it doesn’t move on its own, and outside the locker room it doesn’t stay for long. 

Zach doesn’t know how it got there, and he probably won’t ever find out. He doesn’t know why it’s there, and he’s not sure he wants to. 

He takes too much, a few times, his insides dark and heavy until he gets home, breathes through it, and concentrates on letting it out until his room is so thick with it he can’t breathe, vision blurring and clearing and spotting alarmingly fast. It’s the moment after a flash photo a million times over, blinking into the dark. 

The magic isn’t going to hurt him. It’s in him. It is him. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t scare him, a little bit. 

He watches and waits until the magic sinks into the air, fading into nothing and everything at the same time. 

\---

Josh is clean of magic, still. Now that they’re on the road and Zach discreetly pulled the magic off the guys and into himself they’re all mostly okay. There’s just little bits clinging now, to Dubi’s fists, Cam’s shoulders, Nick’s chest. But Josh? Josh is beautiful and his shirt is tight and his muscles are flexing beneath it and Zach  _ wants _ . 

Josh is a teammate. He’s a teammate and Zach can’t get involved no matter how fucking gorgeous Josh looks in the morning, hair messy and eyes bleary, clutching a mug of coffee, his hands dwarfing it. 

But they’re away from home and away from the arena that makes Zach’s head spin as the magic reflects at him, prismatic, even when he closes his eyes. Forgive him if he feels a little reckless. 

The NHL isn’t college or the NTDP. Zach can’t just hook up with Josh like he did with Dylan. This is the big stage. People would care. 

Instead, he sidles up to a guy who had been maybe eyeing him earlier at the bar, says “Hey.” He tells himself the guy – big, brunette, with a gorgeous smile and great arms, completely clean of magic – doesn’t remind him of Josh.

Zach isn’t very good at lying to himself, even if he can lie easily to other people. His face is just like that.

“Hey, yourself,” the guy says. He shifts a little closer to Zach and there’s a little twinge of triumph – Zach pegged him right. “I’m Danny, can I buy you a drink?”

Zach isn’t very good at flirting – again, his face – but he must be doing something right, he thinks, later, pushing at the waistband of Danny’s jeans in the bar bathroom, kissing him messily. 

“Can I– I wanna blow you,” Danny breathes into his mouth and, well, Zach isn’t exactly going to say no to that. 

Danny gets on his knees, gets Zach’s pants open and pulls his dick out. He has the same hair as Josh; he’s not looking up and Zach can almost pretend. 

“Can I–” Zach touches his head, and Danny huffs out a laugh, nice. 

“You can pull, if you want,” he says, and gets his mouth on Zach’s dick. 

Danny’s good, knows what he’s doing, and Zach’s a teenage boy. He gets close fast. He’s about to warn Danny – he’s not quite there but almost, and Zach would appreciate the warning himself – when someone bangs on the door. 

“Hey Zach, you in there?” Josh’s voice floats through the thin wooden door. 

Zach comes. 

“Oh shit, sorry,” he says to Danny, yells “Yeah, one sec,” to Josh. 

Danny gets up off his knees and spits in the sink. “It’s fine, long as you’re planning on returning the favor.”

“Yeah, but it’ll have to be fast,” Zach nods toward the door. “Sounds like my friends are leaving.”

He sucks off Danny, quick and dirty, and swallows. Josh isn’t waiting outside the bathroom when Zach leaves – which, why would he be? – and Zach’s almost a little disappointed. 

“Thanks, man,” Danny says, and wades off onto the dance floor. 

Zach finds Josh at the table the team claimed early in the night, two jackets on his arm. “You’ve got a little–” he makes an aborted movement, as if he was reaching towards Zach, and points at his own mouth instead. 

“Oh,” Zach says. He wipes off his mouth. Maybe he’s projecting, but Josh seems less than thrilled at the evidence of Zach hooking up. Yeah. Projecting. 

\---

He doesn’t realize how much time he spends in his room until Josh comments on it and – does it upset Josh, that he doesn’t spend time with him at home? 

“I’m playing video games,” he covers, which – stupid, stupid, stupid – he and Josh have a living room with a console set up and he could play out there. He doesn’t ever use the xbox in his room. He doesn’t even think it’s plugged in.

“Sure,” Seth says. “I bet you’re playing with  _ something. _ ”

And no one can read Zach, usually, but he can still blush, and he does blush, protesting. It doesn’t do anything to prevent them from thinking what they’re all thinking, but that’s not a bad thing. It just means they won’t guess what he’s really doing. (Not that they would even consider it, but Zach is paranoid. They used to burn his ancestors at the stake.)

It’s actually going pretty well, cleaning up the raw magic in the locker room. It’s not very difficult, if Zach does it in small doses, idling behind after practice and games. It’s a little draining, to hold the magic inside him until he gets home and he can lay on his bed and let it float up to the ceiling like his personal Aurora Borealis, but he can brush it off as exertion from working out.

The thing is - since he started, they’re winning. They keep winning. The magic still sticks in the corners, glistening at him like raven’s wings, but it’s better. Cleaner. Zach can relax in the locker room, finally. He can finally participate in locker room chirping without getting distracted by the gaping voids dripping from Dubi’s hands, the dark lights floating from Fligs’ mouth. He’s not seeing double, triple, quadruple, everywhere he looks, blurred by shiny-dark color. 

He can settle. He didn’t feel unsafe in the locker room before, but constantly wrong-footed, a little disconcerted and just  _ off _ . It feels right now, like team and family and stuff like Zach had felt back at UMich and in the NTDP. 

When he’s on the ice there’s not any magic to get in the way. But the roar of the crowd at a home game? The sound of the cannon when they score? 

That feels magical.

\---

Zach is almost done. He’s just got edges to clean and little spots where the magic is hiding. He took Matty out to lunch the other day – Matty, who has been in Columbus the longest out of anyone – and pulled the raw magic off his shoulders while he was distracted. Matty looked taller, walking out, and Zach smiled to himself. 

The team feels better, the atmosphere in the room lighter, and Zach knows it’s because the heaviness of the magic, invisible to everyone but him, was pushing them down. Gravity was a little stronger in there, and now it feels normal, good. 

The team has the most wins they’ve had in their history. It feels amazing. Zach isn’t responsible for how fucking good the team is, but he knows he plays a big role, beyond what he’s done in the room. He’s tearing it up, breaking Blue Jackets rookie records, and that’s all him on the ice.  

But now that it’s cleaner, without the distraction of so much magic in the room, Zach keeps noticing Josh. 

Not that he ever wasn’t noticing Josh, but now there aren’t other things to focus on. On the ice he’s on, thinking only about hockey, but off of it it’s all Josh. Zach has no reason to spend so much time in his room anymore but he still does, because he doesn’t know how to deal with being in their communal spaces and wanting to kiss him all the time when he can’t.

Zach is out to the team, ever since they started wrapping pride tape around their stick blades and he blurted it out. They would’ve known, anyway, from who he hooks up with: gorgeous brunettes with huge biceps and soft smiles. Zach likes girls, has been with a few, but he’s had a type lately, since he met Josh. 

Zach never thought it would be easy, being bi and in the NHL, but he wasn’t exactly expecting to fall in love with a teammate. (He maybe should have, though. Dylan warned him, but Dylan’s weird crush on his captain is nothing like Zach falling for his roommate.) 

He doesn’t let himself look too long, tries so hard to act normal around Josh. 

The problem is that hockey players are overwhelmingly straight. The problem is that Josh has never given Zach any indication that he is not straight. The problem is that Josh has brought girls back to their apartment and Zach has been forced to listen to his moans, knows what he sounds like when he’s getting his dick sucked or when he’s inside someone. 

There are a lot of problems with having any sort of romantic or sexual feelings towards Josh. 

Zach jerks off, biting his lip, trying to pretend that the boy he’s imagining on top of him isn’t Josh. It never really works. 

\---

There’s one last bit of raw magic that’s been evading him, trapped in Bob’s stall. He gets it after practice one day, and even though his insides feel weighed down by the magic there’s still a spark of joy that overwhelms that, knowing that he’s done. It’s clean. 

He knows he’s acting a little weird, on the drive home. Josh keeps glancing at him, a half grin forming on his face.

“You’re smiling,” he says. 

“I just have a good feeling,” Zach says. “About the team, you know. This is going to be a really good year for us.”

“It already has been,” Josh says. “We’re fucking awesome.” He’s grinning now two and Zach’s caught up in the thrill, he’s  _ done _ , and Josh is smiling at him. The latter isn’t a totally rare occurrence but that doesn’t mean he isn’t elated when it happens. 

“You wanna play Call of Duty?” Josh asks when they get home, shoulders bumping on the way through the door. 

“I just gotta take care of something,” Zach says. “But in a little bit, yes.”

Josh looks a little disappointed, for some reason. “Okay,” he says. “In a little bit.”

Zach makes a beeline to his room and closes the door behind him. He sits on his bed, cross legged, and lets the magic flow out in a thin string, floating up towards the ceiling to form a hazy cloud. 

The door opens and the string Zach is pushing out fizzles in the air, turning a little black and dissipating. 

“I’ve never seen it before,” Josh says. 

“Seen what?” Zach asks, desperately attempting to cover. But the magic is right there, visible to the eyes of even those who aren’t magic themselves. 

Josh gestures to it. “Magic. You know. I could tell you were getting it out of the locker room but I didn’t really know how.”

“You could tell?” Zach says, faint. 

“Yeah, I mean, it smells a lot different in there now.”

“Smells?” Zach asks, still a little dumbfounded. Josh knows, Josh knows, Josh  _ knows _ . 

“Yeah, can’t you smell magic? You smell like it, but different because it’s in you. It’s less harsh. Nicer.” 

“So you knew this whole time,” Zach says, slowly. “I didn’t need to be locking myself in my room for hours.”

Realization dawns on Josh’s face. “You weren’t avoiding me?” he asks. 

“No, I – the first thing we learn is that we aren’t supposed to tell people because we’ll get burned at the stake like the witch trials or something.”

“Witches have schools?” Josh says, sounded awed. 

“We have, like, summer camp,” Zach explains. “Wait, how do you know about witches anyway? I would be able to tell if you were one.”

“My Aunt Mara is,” Josh says , studying him quietly. “That’s why I can smell it, she thinks. But I don’t understand how you didn’t know I know about magic. I do cleansing stuff every day.” 

It makes sense to Zach, now, why the magic seems to slip off Josh like he’s resistant, why their apartment always feels so clean.

“I’m not very good at magic,” he says. “I never really paid attention to stuff like that.”

“But you fixed the locker room,” Josh says.

“It wasn’t broken, really. It was just messy,” Zach says. “I cleaned it up a little.”

“Oh,” Josh says. He looks a little lost, like he isn’t sure what to say. “Well, I’m glad you aren’t avoiding me.”

“I would never avoid you,” Zach says before he can stop himself. He knows it’s not true, though, that he has been avoiding Josh. It’s for the best, so he doesn’t betray his embarrassing feelings. 

“I–I’m glad,” Josh repeats. He looks like he wants to say something else. He doesn’t. 

Zach says, awkwardly, “I have to finish up. Do you… Do you want to watch?”

“Sure,” Josh says, and sits beside Zach on his bed. 

\---

It comes out all in a rush, Josh looking almost frantic as Zach lets them into the apartment after practice. “I have to tell you something.”

He’s been on edge all day, Zach’s noticed. He thought it might be the magic thing, but Josh knew about that all along. He can’t be nervous about that. 

“Okay,” Zach says. “Do you want to sit down?”

“Yes. Yeah,” Josh says, jittery. They sit down on the couch, knees tilted towards each other. 

Zach waits. 

“I think – I think I like you,” Josh says, voice flat yet panicked, looking at his lap. 

“What,” Zach says. 

“I don’t think, actually. I know. I really like you.” Josh sounds a little more confident. He looks up and Zach when he says it, then lets his gaze drift back down. 

“What,” Zach says, again. Zach is – he must be fucking dreaming because this can’t be real life, it can’t. 

“I thought you liked me, but I wasn’t sure how I felt so I didn’t say anything. But then when I was ready you started avoiding me and I was scared I was making things up and –”

“You  _ knew _ ?” Zach asks. 

“You’re, like, really obvious, dude,” Josh says. He isn’t looking down anymore. The look on his face is so soft and Zach can’t fucking handle this.

“I was avoiding you so you wouldn’t find out! And you  _ knew _ this whole time?”

Josh looks puzzled. “I thought it was because of the magic thing.”

“It was only mostly because of the magic thing. I was scared you would freak out. I was trying to not let you find out until I could get over you.”

“Why would I hate you?” Josh asks. “I’m totally cool with your gay-ness.”

“Bisexuality,” Zach corrects. 

“Right, that.” Josh fixes his gaze on Zach, unflinching. “Me too, by the way.” 

Zach is dead silent.

“Are you mad that I didn’t tell you that I knew? Because I wanted to be ready. Liking guys is kind of weird. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling, and stuff.”

“I’m not  _ mad _ , just – there’s so much that I could’ve been telling you this whole time.”

“Well, not the whole time,” Josh says. “I only figured it out two months ago.”

“We could’ve been kissing for  _ two months _ ?” 

“I thought you changed your mind!” Josh protests.

“Changed my mind? 

“I don’t know!”

Zach sighs. He can feel himself smiling. “Fucking kiss me already, you asshole.”

Josh clearly can’t say no to that. Of course he does. He marches up to Zach, assertive, and places a gentle hand on his jaw, and then Zach can feel his breath, and -

Josh’s lips feel more magical than the roar of the Fifth Line, more magical than the actual fucking magic he’s lived with his entire life. 

This feels like the anticipation of winning.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Boy, was this a journey. I was super nervous about going into my first exchange. I had a minor breakdown over the first draft of this fic and how it wasn't working, and ended up starting from the top with something totally different. But I ended up with something I'm pretty pleased with, so I hope you enjoyed it too. Thanks for reading!
> 
> [tumblr](https://brandondubinskys.tumblr.com) | [twitter](https://twitter.com/stromeeyebrows)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [tell the universe we're not concerned [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12201048) by [escherzo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/escherzo/pseuds/escherzo)




End file.
